photo by jonathan hankin
Upsize Business Builder of the Year
Renters Warehouse
With brand properly
tweaked, founder spends
big-time to grow quickly
"Today is my second month
as a retired 28-year-old," says Brenton
Hayden, as his introduction to judges
hearing the stories of the five finalists for
the Upsize Business Builders project.
It's an attention-grabbing opening line,
and the founder of Renters Warehouse,
the six-year-old "professional landlord
20
"We hope to become the ChapStick of lip balm,
the Kleenex of tissue paper," says Brenton
Hayden, founder of Renters Warehouse, and to
that end he advertises aggressively.
service" as they learned to call it during a
re-branding initiative, follows with some
impressive statistics: $5.17 million in revenue in 2012, up from $1.8 million in 2010.
Debt free. Operating in 13 markets in nine
states. Second-largest such service in the
country.
Aggressive advertising has fueled the
growth, mostly in radio but also during
the Super Bowl, from a start of $196,000
in revenue its first year. They spent more
than $2 million in 2012 on radio advertising, and Hayden credits the effort to
making Renters Warehouse "a household
name in Minnesota."
"We've only been on the radio for three
years and we are now edging out Toyota" as
the largest radio advertiser in the state, he
upsize december 2013 • january 2014
photos by gerogene bergstrom
and it's a social enterprise." Maverick
posted $5 million in revenue in 2012,
up from $4.1 million the year before and
$3.4 million the year before that.
www.upsizemag.com
